Which parliaments most closely resemble the vote of the people?

Hungary has the biggest gap between votes and parliamentary seats in the EU, a Euronews analysis of election data shows.

Viktor Orban’s thumping victory earlier this month gave his Fidesz party two-thirds of seats in the country’s parliament.

But his right-wing political movement earned just under half of votes cast in the April 8 poll.

That means there is an 18% gap between the proportion of votes won and the share of parliamentary seats given.

Lithuania came second in our study, while Poland, Greece and Latvia also had gaps of more than 10%.

The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Malta had the closest alignment in the bloc between share of votes and seats.

Most of the EU uses a version of proportional representation (PR), which awards seats according to what proportion of the vote each party won. However, critics point out that the system often results in coalitions which can cause delays and undermine the ability of the government to act decisively.

France and the UK use variations of the first-past-the-post system (FPTP), which splits the country into electoral regions, awarding a parliamentary position to the party with the most votes and nothing to the runners up. In France the election is run over two rounds to ensure that the eventual winner of each seat has the support of at least half of voters.